Daniel, Junius

by Ralph Hardee Rives, 1986

27 June 1828–13 May 1864

Junius Daniel, Confederate general, was born in Halifax, the son of John Reeves Jones Daniel (1802–68), attorney general of North Carolina and member of the United States Congress, and his wife, Martha Stith. He was educated at an elementary school in Halifax and at the J. M. Lovejoy Academy in Raleigh before receiving an appointment by President John Knox Polk to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1846. Upon graduation in 1851, Daniel was sent to Newport, Ky., as assistant quartermaster; in the following year, he was stationed at Fort Albuquerque, N. Mex., where he remained for five years. In 1857 he resigned his commission to begin a career as a planter in Louisiana, joining his father who had moved there following his last term in Congress in 1851.

In October 1860 Daniel married Ellen Long, daughter of Colonel John J. Long of Northampton County, N.C. They had no children.

Though offered a commission by the state of Louisiana after Lincoln's call for troops in April 1860, Daniel returned to Halifax and offered his services to his native state. He was chosen colonel of the Fourth (later Fourteenth) Regiment and remained as the commanding officer until the period of enlistment expired. He was then offered command of the Forty-third and Forty-fifth regiments and the Second North Carolina Cavalry. He accepted the command of the Forty-fifth Regiment.

Daniel led four regiments from Raleigh to Goldsboro and organized them into a brigade; afterward, he organized two other brigades. In June 1862 he was ordered to Petersburg, Va., where his brigade joined General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia before the Seven Days' Battle, though it took no active part in this battle.

He was commissioned brigadier general on 1 Sept. 1862, making him one of five men from Halifax County to serve as brigadier generals in the Confederate Army. He spent the fall of 1862 with his brigade at Drury's Bluff and subsequently served in North Carolina. After the Battle of Chancellorsville, he was transferred to General Robert E. Rodes's division of the Second Corps in Lee's army where he served with distinction in the Pennsylvania Campaign. His brigade was entrusted with the bearing of the "Corps Flag." In the Battle of Gettysburg, Daniel's brigade suffered the greatest losses of any brigade in the corps on the first day of the battle.

While leading his brigade at the "Horseshoe Bend" near Spottsylvania Court House, Va., on 12 May 1864, General Daniel was struck in the abdomen by a minie ball and died the next day. His body was taken to Halifax and buried in the old colonial cemetery, which is now a part of the Historic Site Area.

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